Taken as a group, the Turkish Tales obsessively thematize the figure we know as the Byronic hero: a dark, brooding figure with some mysterious tragedy in his past; always alone, even in a crowd, he displays a world-weariness that nevertheless gathers itself into a reluctant heroism at moments of crisis.

Second, I will argue that the state of marginality, far from being an accident of empirical reception, is both thematized and theorized by Clare's appropriations -- in particular, by the "Byronic" poems in which he reflected on contemporary literary production and the conditions of his own career.